Day 1: Arrived in Marseilles airport ahead of schedule, around 10am. This was not really good news for me as Vanessa and Anne weren’t getting in until 6 pm, Marseilles was a 10 Euro bus ride away, and the hotel was not only booked in Vanessa’s name, but I had no idea where it was. Thus started my wonderful day in the Marseilles airport, and was I ever grateful that I had a book with me. 8 hours, and 800 pages later, Vanessa and Anne’s plane arrived right on schedule from Amsterdam, they being the only two college kids on break who would go to Amsterdam for Anne Frank and Van Gogh rather than drugs and prostitutes. We head into town, find the address and go to our hotel, only to find the front desk closed with no way to get our keys. The emergency number posted only resulted in an answering machine. We go find another hotel where the extremely nice and helpful (and French too) receptionist calls our hotel for us, talks to the people who decided to pick up this time and gets us the combo to the safe with our keys. Finally in our room, Vanessa and I go on a search for food and find a place that will allow us to get take-out, but take-out on the dinner plates they usually serve on. The guy even gives us a bottle opener for the water we ordered. Dinner was Italian pasta while watching a weird French show that put naked people in public places to see others’ reactions. Fun stuff.
Day 2: Off to Nice on the train. It was about a 2.5 hour trip to Nice from Marseilles, a time even the vaunted TGV didn’t cut down on. The TGV had a run time of 2h34min to Nice, the regional was 2h40min and was half the cost. Regional here we come. While on the train, we watched this little girl running around on the platform, making weird faces. She saw us watching and proceeded to stick her tongue out at us, flicked us off, throw a rock at our window, and then run off once more. She was very entertaining. Once in Nice, past the sex shops directly across from St. Charles Gare (the train station), we find the hotel easily, drop our stuff, and hit the seaside. We walked all over the city, picked up Candace, ate some Cuban food, and went to bed.
Day 3: Off to Monaco. Monaco is a 20 minute train ride from Nice and is 3 Euros round trip. Hard to beat a price like that so off to Monaco we went. We arrived in time to see the changing of the guard in front of the Palace, which, I’m sorry to say, has nothing on the pomp and circumstance of the Buckingham Palace guard changing. After the switch, we grabbed lunch at a place that advertised having sausage. Thinking I would be getting some good sausage, I ordered it, only to have 2 skinny hotdogs w/out a bun being brought to me. Very disappointing. Walked around the rest of Monaco, which didn’t take too long and headed back to Nice for dinner. We went to a kebab place just off Promenade de Anglais. It was amazing. A full plate of greasy meat strips, lettuce and tomato with tzasaki (spelled it way off) sauce and a beer. Best meal of the trip so far.
Day 4: Back to Marseilles. We go back to Marseilles and try with no luck to find an English cinema. After this failure we grab dinner at a little restaurant were our food adventures begin. Looking at the chef’s recommendations, my French fails me and I order what I think to be a beef and chicken meat pie. It wasn’t. What I got instead was a plate of raw meat with a raw egg on top. This was very shocking and when I finally was able to explain to the waiter that this wasn’t what I thought I had ordered and could they please take it back and cook it for me, my table had ran through a little French and a lot of English, Italian, and Spanish getting the concept across. The chef got his revenge however by cooking the meat for me and then pouring the raw egg on top of it. Besides the egg, the meat was great, and had a great spice to it.
Day 5: Walkabout. We spent the next day walking all through Marseilles, of which there is a great deal to walk through. We couldn’t go out to the Castle D’If, made famous by The Count of Monte Cristo, so instead we got crepes and panini on the quay (For some reason the Southern French seem obsessed with Italian. It was a struggle to find places that weren’t Italian restaurants). After walking about, we headed to our room to grab our bags and go to the airport. Our flight was the next morning, but it was so early so to make getting to the airport very difficult and checkout impossible. So we, and most of our flight, instead grabbed benches at the airport. It was a very sleepless night that I only survived by buying Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince in a bookstore that had about 10 English language books, most of them being by Clive Cluster. The flight the next morning was a bit delayed because a steward needed to be called in to cover for a sick call, but we arrived on time and took a cab back to Trastevere, our little corner of Rome.
